What happened to the science-fiction future?

If this is the future, someone forgot to stock it properly.
Where are the personal service robots, the moon vacations, the
self-contained cities rising out of the smog? What happened to all
those sci-fi prophecies? In Where’s My Jetpack?
(Bloomsbury), Popular Mechanics columnist Daniel Wilson
moans that “it’s the twenty-first century, and things are a little
disappointing.” Wilson, the author of How to Survive a Robot
Uprising, begs “all the scientists, inventors, and tinkerers
out there” to “please hurry up” (emphasis in
original).

Wilson shouldn’t be so moony. Fanciful futurist visions can
obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations
that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave
ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate
responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies
with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists.
Take the titular jetpack. It exists—but no one really wants it.
It’s a 125-pound monster with a flight time of 30 seconds, powered
by expensive fuel. The dream of individual human flight was
realized in 1961, and we haven’t been able to find any use for it
outside of Bond movies, the first Super Bowl halftime show, and
Ovaltine commercials.

We may not have the moving sidewalks of ever-increasing speed
described by Robert Heinlein in his 1940 story “The Roads Must
Roll.” But we do have escalators. With Heinlein’s dream of a
begoggled pedestrian commuting at 100 miles an hour dancing in your
head, pokey old escalators may not seem like much of a consolation.
But in 1898, when Harrods department store in London unveiled its
newly installed automated stairs, employees had brandy and smelling
salts on hand to treat shoppers suffering from the shock of the
new.

If you’re not sold on the glories of escalators, consider the
progress we’ve made toward one fanciful vision presented at the
1964 New York World’s Fair: underwater dwellings. As I write, there
are about 100 luxury submarines plying the seas. Average folks with
a yen to join the Five Fathom Club can save themselves the cost of
maintaining a private sub by booking a couple of nights off the
coast of Key Largo, Florida, at the former underwater lab now known
as Jules’ Undersea Lodge. From there, you can scuba dive to your
heart’s content and amuse yourself in the evenings however you see
fit. If nosy cetaceans are a problem—and apparently they will be,
as there’s been a rash of Peeping Tom dolphin incidents—just close
the curtains.

If your tastes run shallower and more luxurious, wait until 2008
and book one of the 220 suites at Hydropolis, a “submarine leisure
complex” in the Persian Gulf. The property on which Hydropolis is
being built belongs to His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed Bin
Rashid Al Maktoum, crown prince of Dubai, just the sort of person
you need when you’re making a science-fiction future a reality.
Initially planned as a deep-sea project, Hydropolis has become a
shallow-water structure with views of underwater vistas and of
light shows in the sky. It contains everything from a movie theater
to a cosmetic surgery clinic. The dream of deep-sea luxury living
isn’t perfectly realized here, even with a crown prince
bankrolling. But Hydropolis promises most of the amenities of
deep-sea life without much of the bother.

For boomers and their offspring raised on The Jetsons,
the sky-scraping city-in-the-clouds is the sine qua non of
the future. In early America, Wilson notes, steeples of churches
were the tallest structures around—closer my God to thee, and all
that. By the 1850s, state capitols took over as the most imposing
buildings. By the 1900s, the skyscraper took the skyline for
capitalism, trumping both church and state.

Today such towers have spread far beyond America and further
toward the heavens. Dubai, for instance, is looking up to the
clouds as well as down to the sea floor. Already rising to 1,680
feet, the Burj Dubai is projected to be the world’s tallest manmade
structure when it’s completed next year. But for sheer hubris—and
for the closest approximation to the Jetsons domicile
rising out of the smog, the ground invisible from the living room
windows—the prize goes to Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man. He’s
building a house for his family in the heart of Mumbai. The house
just happens to be a 60-story glass tower. The project includes a
helipad, a health club, hanging gardens, and six floors of
parking.

The helipad would be especially handy if Ambani had a flying
car. He doesn’t, of course, but he does have a helicopter, that
less sexy but more practical realization of the flying-car dream.
Small boys everywhere will always doodle Ferraris with wings when
they’re bored in class, but the actual lived “future” is not
something that leaps off an engineer’s drawing board or from a
novelist’s visions. It emerges from complex, unpredictable
interactions between visionary inspiration, technological limits,
and consumers’ insistent pragmatism.

In 1928, Wilson notes, Henry Ford understood what people wanted
from their personal transit: flight. His “sky flivver” actually
worked, but production was stopped when some stupid pilot died in
an accident. The crash put the fear of gravity into potential
customers and the line was shut down. Ford went back to producing
identical jalopies for the masses, and did quite well for
himself.

In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford
University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that
technological innovations don’t matter as much as we think they do.
We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs
themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really
matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our
high hopes for each new innovation as “futurism,” a disease that
led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where
electricity would be “too cheap to meter,” Segways would be
ubiquitous, and voice recognition software would replace keyboards.
Moving sidewalks exist, after all. Even now they creep
through many of our airports. Heinlein’s future isn’t upon us for
the same reason we don’t all have jetpacks: We haven’t wanted to
make the technology our own.

If Wilson is disappointed with the future, it’s because he
approaches it the wrong way. He—and we—shouldn’t read science
fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative
technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we
should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to
use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that’s
already lying around.

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In the first chapter of the Foundation series, Hari Selden meets a
young student and shows him calculations on his hand-held
calculator. On close reading, this device appears to be on the
level of 1990s technology. Asimov placed the Foundation series
10,000 years in the future.

Yep. That's why the worst sci-fi (especially cinematic endeavors)
is that which relies most on technological instead of ideological
themes. Especially now, special-effects-laden sci-fi cinema has a
shelf life of about 3 years, after which it looks positively stupid
(with a few fine exceptions).

I thought this was a perceptive article. Katherine makes the
point that jetpacks, flying and floating cars, and moving sidewalks
already exist, but nobody really has much use for them after all.
As to the moving sidewalks, are we Americans already a bunch of
fatasses? The last thing we need is *assisted walking*...

I do believe that "personal flight options" will become more common
in the 21st Century, though the result will probably be very
different than the flying bubble cars in The Jetsons. Companies are
already working on air taxis, in order to bypass major airports and
make better use of our drastically underused small airports and
airfields.

Controlled fusion really is right around the corner. No,
really.
Controlled fusion is only 10 years away. It's been that way for the
last 50 years.

I know how you guys feel. I've been expecting the eggheads to crack
this nut since ~1967. Fuck a bunch of flying cars and cities in the
clouds, give me cheap, clean, almost limitless energy any old time.
Remember that cold fusion debacle? Didn't we really wnt it to be
true? Weren't we really pissed of that these incompetent boobs got
our hopes up, only to be dashed on the rocks? It's one of the many
factors contributing to my skepticism.

Flying Cars: I don't understand why more people don't get pilot
licenses. It is not too expensive and does not take too much time.
It would be much more convenient than relying on airlines all the
time. Just rent an aircraft when you need it or get partial
ownership of one and that is good enough.

Instead I keep hearing about groups of "concerned citizens"
rallying to close small general aviation airports, often private
ones. For the children.

"You mean we're all going to become convicted criminals and be
deported to someplace far away?"

Could be, cobber. You break rule, Authority deports you to Luna.
And is getting harder and harder to avoid breaking rules.

Do this. Don't do that. Stay back in line. Where's tax receipt?
Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No
left turn. No right turn. Queue up and pay fine. Take back and get
stamped. Drop dead -- but first get permit.

I was surprised that the 'water powered engine' nonsense did not
pop up during the latest, natural, price appreciation in the energy
markets.

For some reason, organic hydrogen does not seem to get the same
play. Maybe because it is so much more practical. I have been using
it for decades and there is certainly no shortage of the stuff,
other than the artificial ones that crop up.

We have lost confidence in our ability to project into the
future more than a century or two, because things are changing so
rapidly. If things continue to change at their current pace,
perhaps we will have immortalized ourselves into pure information
in 500 years. Who knows. So "hard" science fiction seems incredibly
dated in just ten or twenty years -- just think how unconvincing
the world of "Sandworms of Dune" seems now comepared to how fresh
the world of "Dune" seemed when that book came out. All this
reminds me of Damon Knight's comment on A.E. van Vogt: "After 10
thousand years of chaos, the hero drives down the street in a
Studebaker."

"Controlled fusion is only 10 years away. It's been that way for
the last 50 years."

The federal government's fusion research has killed fusion. It has
turned fusion into a lifetime research prospect.

Look at the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER). I
think the *earliest* date expected for completing construction is
2016. And then there will be 20 *years* of subsequent testing. Talk
about boondoggles!

Flying Cars: It is not too expensive and does not take too
much time. It would be much more convenient than relying on
airlines all the time.

Airliners fly 3-4x faster than most single-engine private planes.
Other than that, the main problem with making small planes routine,
convenient transportation is weather. When you really need to get
home, but there is a line of thunderstorms or icing conditions in
the way -- it's just not fun. And there's not much high-tech,
sci-fi solutions can do about thunderstorms and ice. Not until
small, cheap, private airplanes fly at 35,000 feet, anyway.

The energy cost of operating a flying car will likely keep them
MIA for quite a while.

The book mentioned "The Shock of the Old" (Oxford University
Press), by British historian David Edgerton, I don't think this
fellow gives enough credence to what has been created. (Its like
when you live in the mountains all the type, you get numbed to the
spectacular views.)

Things I could not have imagined I would have here in 2007 back in
1975 (granted, this is in the United States):

* 2 computers in my house. With fast graphic displays.

* I would have to worry about viruses in my computers.

* A son that when he was 4 expected shows on broadcast TV to always
have a rewind button. Then 10 years later -- they do (TiVO).

* Mountain Bikes that have hydraulic disk breaks and 27 speeds (3 x
9 gears) and shock absorbers. Giving the rider to go just about
anywhere under human power.

* A complete blue print of the Human Genome downloaded on to
computers.

* More different types of food in the grocery stores than can be
eaten/tasted in a year. So much vast quantities of it managing
obesity becomes a major problem.

* A human with prosthetic that can race nearly as fast as a
standard human.

* The internet with access to more information resources than any
library that existed in the world in 1970 (e.g., this summer I
examined a satellite picture of the campsite we were going to be
camping at for our summer vacation).

* Kids with cystic fibrosis routinely living past 20+ years
old.

* My mother being 85 years old and swimming 5 days a week at an
indoor pool facility.

* Microwave ovens that cook food in seconds to minutes. (Something
that takes 5 minutes to warm seems like forever.)

* 24 hour news channels. Plus news on the internet.

* DVD movies that are so easy to pickup and use they begin to make
the theater going experience
a bit old fashioned.

* Camping equipment that in 1975 would have seemed fit for an
expedition on an alien planet.

* Small music players that are the size of a matchbox that can hold
thousands and thousands of songs. (Remember those old 8
tracks?)

* Visual detection of planets around other star systems.

* Drugs of numerous types for many illnesses that were considered
incurable.

* Cancer patients routinely surviving.

* A globally integrated economy that supplies goods and services
with the "invisibility" similar to turning on a light switch -- its
there so reliably and so often you begin to take it for
granted.

We do need to remember that we have already come a very long way
since the 50's but just in ways not as noticeable as robot maids or
time-traveling waterbeds. We have a world more connected that ever
before, with things getting better all the time in terms of quality
of life. I think that's really the future we want to live in.